July 1st, 2013

In 2006, Universal Music Distribution unveiled volume six of its epic Complete Motown Singles series – 125 tracks covering the year 1966.

Nestled between Tammi Terrell’s “Baby Don’tcha Worry” and Chris Clark’s “Do I Love You (Yes I Do)” were two previously unreleased tracks by The Mynah Birds, the legendary Toronto R&B band that for a mere six weeks fused the unlikely talents of future punk/funk star Rick James (or Ricky James Matthews as he was then known) and Canadian guitar legend Neil Young.

Scheduled for release as a single on Motown’s V.I.P. subsidiary in spring ‘66, and assigned the catalogue number 25033, the garage/folk-rock classic “It’s My Time” (allegedly one of several Rick James/Neil Young collaborations but credited to Michael Valvano, Ricky James Matthews and R Dean Taylor in the boxed set) should have been a smash single.

Driven by James’s distinctive soulful voice and Young’s ringing 12-string guitar, the pulsating “It’s My Time”, coupled with the ballad “Go On and Cry”, credited to James, rhythm guitarist John Taylor and Motown staff writers Michael Valvano and R Dean Taylor, had all the ingredients to be a major hit.

But it was withdrawn when, mid-way through the recording of an album with producers William “Mickey” Stevenson, Michael Valvano and R Dean Taylor at Motown’s Hitsville studio in Detroit, the band imploded spectacularly. James was AWOL from the US Navy, and his surrender to the FBI and subsequent imprisonment put an end to the recordings.

For Neil Young, who would relocate to L.A. with bass player Bruce Palmer and help form Buffalo Springfield, The Mynah Birds have become just a footnote in a long and illustrious career.

In Rick James’s case, however, the group’s recordings with Motown signalled the first of several dealings with Berry Gordy’s soul stable and would ultimately see the singer resign as a solo artist in 1977, storming the charts with the million-selling hits “You and I”, “Give It to Me Baby” and “Super Freak”.

To trace Rick James’s rise to superstardom, we need to go back to the autumn of 1964 and a thriving Toronto live scene, into which stepped a young man wanted by the FBI: James Ambrose Johnson Jr.

Months shy of his 17th birthday, the Buffalo native made an instant impression after sitting in with Klaus Karl Kassbaum’s band at the El Patio coffeehouse. The future Steppenwolf bass player, better known as Nick St Nicholas, hired him as singer, and, dressed in the teenager’s US naval gear, they became the aptly named Sailorboys.

Besides Ricky James Matthews (the stage name he adopted) and Nick St Nicholas, the line up at this time comprised lead guitarist Ian Goble and drummer Rick Cameron.

One early witness was Bev Davies, who later ran the Cellar coffeehouse where she befriended struggling folkie Neil Young.

“I was at Ontario College of Art in fall 1964 [and] “used to go to the El Patio to see Ricky James Matthews’ band,” she recalls. “Two outstanding songs that I remember him doing were ‘Hitch Hike’ and ‘I Got My Mojo Working’.”

Local fame beckoned when eccentric businessman Colin Kerr, the owner of a local nightclub called the Mynah Bird, offered his services as a manager and renamed them after his favourite pet, a minor bird called Rajah. Kerr also insisted the musicians adopt Rajah as band mascot and dress in minor bird colours on stage!

“He had [this] one minor bird that he would leave in a cage with a tape running 24-7 saying, ‘Hello, Ed Sullivan’ because he was quite convinced that sooner or later we’d end up on his [TV] show,” remembers new drummer Richie Grand.

More importantly, Kerr engineered a recording deal with the Canadian arm of Columbia Records and a rare one-off single – the R&B belter “Mynah Bird Hop”, coupled with the calypso-flavoured “Mynah Bird Song”.

Both sides of the single were penned by Colin’s brother, Ben, and featured another future Steppenwolf member, John Goadsby (aka Goldy McJohn) on organ plus new guitarist Frank Iozzo (aka Arnel).

Issued in early ‘65 with the catalogue number C4-2660, the single bombed. “Mynah Birds Hop” is by far the more impressive of the two sides and finds the teenager sharing lead vocals with a man nearly 10 years’ his age – Jimmy Livingston, who would go on to front The Just Us, The Tripp, Livingston’s Journey and Heather Merryweather alongside several future Rick James sidemen.

However, it was the arrival of Bruce Palmer, traded with Nick St Nicholas from local rivals, Jack London & The Sparrows (later to morph into Steppenwolf) that shifted The Mynah Birds up a gear.

Soon after, Kerr landed a showcase gig at the Collonade Theatre in downtown Toronto and, according to Grand, paid hundreds of girls to rush the band’s limo as it pulled up outside the venue!

Tired of Kerr’s crazy antics, the band split that spring. “We broke away from him and went with another little promoter,” remembers Grand, who bailed soon after to join The Stormy Clovers; the first group to perform Leonard Cohen songs.

Left with the band name, Rick James and Bruce Palmer secured the patronage of well-healed businessman John Eaton, and in June ‘65 brought in three musicians from Brantford, Ontario band, The Bunkies – lead guitarist Tom Morgan, rhythm guitarist and songwriter John Taylor and drummer Rick Mason.

Eschewing the Kerr wardrobe and decked in clothes to match their idols, The Rolling Stones, The new-look Mynah Birds soon turned heads.

One was the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which, according to Mason, filmed the band for a long-lost documentary while playing at the Devil’s Den. “CBC came down the stairs and filmed the whole night of us,” recalls the drummer. “Somewhere in their archives they have the footage of us.”

One of Eaton’s first moves was to buy the musicians new equipment and to set up an expense account. They also acquired a new manager, a shady character known as Morley Shelman, who was suspected of pocketing most of the money Eaton forwarded them.

Nevertheless, it was Shelman who used his connections with actor Sal Mineo to pique the interest of Motown Records. In October ‘65, an awe struck band drove down to Detroit to audition personally for Berry Gordy and Smokey Robinson.

According to Garry Graff and Daniel Durchholz in Neil Young: Long May You Run: The Illustrated History, The Mynah Birds got as far as taping a backing track for “No Greater Love”, written by Howard Lemon and produced by Harvey Fuqua.

But for Tom Morgan, the session was a turning point. Sensing the label was only interested in Rick James, he bailed out in late December making way for an unlikely replacement – struggling folkie Neil Young.

Rick Mason remembers Young’s first job with the band – the Inferno in early January ‘66. “They put rubber gym mats out for us to play on! The first song we go to do, Neil goes up to do his lead and unplugs his guitar. He plays the whole lead without his guitar plugged in!”

The reconfigured band returned to Detroit to begin sessions for an album, but only completed four tracks, cut between 18-26 January.

“Neil used a 12-string a lot,” continues Mason. “But we never did anything as a band. It was all done in parts and they put it together. Then everybody would drop in and do songs with us, like Smokey Robinson and Tammi Terrell.”

Several song titles are listed on the Broadcast Music Inc (BMI) website. Only one, however, is credited to Neil Young: “I’ll Wait Forever” which is listed as a co-write with Ricky James Matthews, Michael Valvano and R Dean Taylor, and was completed at the January sessions.

The other finished track is “I Got You (In My Soul)”, a Rick James/John Taylor co-write that sounds suspiciously like a direct lift from Van Morrison and Them’s “Little Girl”!

John Taylor’s widow Carolyn has five separate song-writing contracts signed by Rick James and her late husband for Jobete Music, dated 18 January 1966. These include “Go On and Cry” and “I Got You (In My Soul)”, plus three previously unknown songs – “We Gotta Go”, “Don’t Change Your Mind” and “Pretty Words”.

According to a Billboard article, dated 5 March 1966, The Mynah Birds had plans to return to Detroit in April to cut further tracks.

“The Mynah Birds are billing themselves as the first Canadian group to be signed by Tamla Motown, with the first single under their new recording and management contract to be released shortly, it’s ‘I’ve Got You [In My Soul]’, written by lead singer Rick James [sic], one of the four numbers cut last month at the Motown studios in Detroit,” ran the review.

It then added: “The group’s personal manager, Morley Shelman, reports they’ll return to Detroit next month for more sessions with an album in sight and talk of US tour upcoming.”

Regrouping in Toronto, The Mynah Birds were billed to play the El Patio on 11-13 February when news of James’s AWOL status leaked. Motown duly scrapped the April sessions, forcing the band apart.

With Neil Young and Bruce Palmer heading to L.A., remaining members John Taylor and Rick Mason kept The Mynah Birds going until spring ‘67 when the drummer received an unexpected visit from Rick James. The singer was back in town looking for musicians to take back to Motown after serving time in military prison.

“We were living in Bay Ridges and Ricky snuck in the house,” remembers Mason. “He came to me and he said, ‘We’re going to the States and we want you to go with us’. But John [Taylor] said, ‘You’re not taking the drums’ and that was the end [of it].”

Instead, James pulled together a new version of The Mynah Birds with former David Clayton-Thomas sidemen, guitarist Bill Ross and drummer Al Morrison, plus bass player/singer Neil Lillie (aka Neil Merryweather) from Jimmy Livingston’s band, The Tripp.

Joined by a young keyboard player, the quintet rehearsed at Motown’s Gold Star studio before laying down backing tracks for three songs – “Masquerade”, “Fantasy” and a new version of “It’s My Time” at Hitsville Studio on 21 June ‘67 with R Dean Taylor. The session soon came to an abrupt halt after a studio altercation.

“Bill Ross got into an argument with Rick over a guitar part, shot his big mouth off and used the ‘N’ word,” remembers Merryweather. “Rick rolled up his sleeves and shoved Ross over Morrison’s drum set.”

Back in Toronto, James and Merryweather searched for replacements but the singer’s chequered past caught up with him one night at a local club.

“The waitress called the cops and they came and nabbed him and put him in jail,” continues Merryweather.

“Apparently, while we were in Detroit, the cops were looking for him in Toronto for a breaking and entering charge. I guess Rick and a few guys broke into a clothes store in Yorkville Village some months before and one of them got caught and fingered Rick.”

After spending time in Toronto’s infamous Don Jail, the singer returned to Motown’s Hitsville in Detroit to work as a staff producer and songwriter.

During early 1968, he co-wrote and produced “Out In The Country” for Canadian soul act, Bobby Taylor & The Vancouvers, featuring a young Tommy Chong (later half of comedy duo Cheech & Chong) on lead guitar.

Rick James also started hanging out with Greg Reeves, a young bass player who worked under producer Norman Whitfield and his song-writing partner Barratt Strong.

“I was constantly being told by Norman Whitfield and Hank Cosby to stay away from him,” says Reeves.

“James and I both lived at the London Inn, right next door to each other and we wrote songs together while living there. Motown was so adamant about me staying from Rick that they moved me to Dearborn, Michigan. James and Calvin Hardaway (Stevie Wonder’s brother) would put riffs together and run them past me and to get musical assistance. James had great stuff even back then.”

That autumn, tired of Detroit and Motown, the pair snuck down to L.A. where they stayed with former Motown associate Eddie Singleton and Miss Ray, Berry Gordy’s ex-wife.

Within weeks, the pair snapped up drummer Steve Rumph from Nick St Nicholas’s band Trust In Men Everywhere and former Yellow Payges lead guitarist Michael Rummans.

“His concept was to form a band that was part white and part black and call it Salt ‘N’ Pepper,” says Rummans. “He had this charisma about him. He also had this energy and this total belief…this certainty of what he was going to do. He knew Berry Gordy and he told me Greg learnt his style from James Jamerson.”

Despite rehearsing material with a keyboard player called Lloyd, including an impressive version of The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”, the band never got any momentum going and split around June ‘69.

James soon learned that his former Mynah Birds cohorts Neil Young and Bruce Palmer were rehearsing with Crosby, Stills and Nash and took Reeves along for a reunion.

“After the band broke up, he called me a few weeks later and he asked me if I wanted to collaborate and write songs,” remembers Rummans. “I asked him what had happened with Greg and he said, ‘Oh, I got him a gig with CSN&Y’. I thought he was bullshitting me but then [later] I saw that album [Déjà vu].”

A few months later, Rick James ran into an another former Mynah Bird – Neil Merryweather, who’d brought his band down from Toronto on Bruce Palmer’s recommendation and recorded two albums for Capitol as Merryweather.

In an amazing twist of fate, Merryweather had jammed with Stephen Stills a few months earlier but had turned down an offer to play bass with Crosby, Stills & Nash.

“We were staying at a motel in Hollywood when [guitarist Dave] Burt showed up and we had a fight,” recalls Merryweather. “I’d had enough, so I quit. When I was going out the door, [James] was about to knock. He was coming over to see me. I said, ‘Rick, here’s a ready-made band – they’re yours’.”

With Merryweather out of the picture, lead guitarist Dave Burt, drummer Gary ‘Coffi’ Hall and keyboard player Ed Roth, who would become a mainstay of James’s bands up until 1973, joined forces with Rick James in a second version of Salt ‘N’ Pepper.

According to Roth, Young’s manager Elliot Roberts briefly expressed an interest in signing them but perhaps sensing that “Rick was a handful” decided to pass. Instead, he secured a booking at the bastion of hippie rock, the Fillmore West, where Salt ‘N’ Pepper opened for Jethro Tull, Fairport Convention and Clouds from 30 April-3 May 1970.

Soon after, their bass player was ousted. “I loved the way he fired me,” recalls Sarns. “We sat down in the kitchen and he said, ‘Chris, this is the deal, I don’t want you in the group anymore and we are going to go on without you’. It was like man-to-man, face-to-face, no bullshit, no talking down, just straight, ‘You’re f****** fired dude’ and I appreciated that. I respect honesty above all else.”

Through Coffi Hall’s wife Joy, who worked for promotions at MCA, Capricorn Records’ founder Phil Walden caught the band live and a recording deal was soon on the cards.

Ed Roth’s elder brother Ivan was present when it came to signing on the dotted line. “The guy slaps the contract on the table, so I started to read it. Rick says, ‘What are you reading it for?’ So, I said, ‘Let’s see what it’s about’, and he said, ‘F*** it’. I always said negotiate but he’d say, ‘No, sign it. Once you’re popular, you can negotiate it later’. He just wanted to keep the momentum going.”

With Ron Johnson from Kaleidoscope assuming bass duties, the group flew to Miami to prepare for some recording sessions, arranged through Walden. However, before recording was due to start with noted producer Tom Dowd, the group was released from the label.

“On the first day in the studio one of the guys from Capricorn Records came over and before we even laid a note down, he gave us our plane tickets home,” remembers Burt. “That’s when I broke out laughing in the studio. It was so bad it was funny.”

“The reason we were thrown off the label is Rick’s fault,” adds Hall. “He kept the car rental as a personal vehicle and when they called to confront us/him, he took the phone from Dave and started to yell back at them. We went back to L.A. and auditioned for Columbia but Phil [Walden] would not release us. I had Joy call and ask for a release.”

Though nothing came of Salt ‘N’ Pepper’s promised album, James and Johnson did get an opportunity to record that summer. According to Ivan Roth, the pair contributed congas and bass on a Sam Moore session, including a cover of Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come”.

However, aside from cameo appearances on Curt Newbury and Bruce Palmer’s solo albums, there was little work, and after further personnel changes Salt ‘N’ Pepper fizzled out in early ‘71.

Burt has this to say about James: “He scared me a lot of times – driving a car through Topanga Canyon at breakneck speed. He could have killed us 10 times but he didn’t care. Rick was laughing hysterically while I screamed for my life. He was like the angel and the demon all in one person. You never knew which one was going to show up.”

Not long after, Rick James, Ron Johnson and Coffi Hall linked up with Rick Gaxiola, lead guitarist with Mama Lion and auditioned for Berry Gordy but nothing came from it.

Back in Toronto that summer, Rick James’s next recording venture was Heaven and Earth, a studio project initiated by Stan Endersby, the guitarist from Roth’s mid-1960s bands, The Just Us, The Tripp and Livingstone’s Journey.

Home after a two-year stint in England where he’d recorded with Peter Quaife’s post-Kinks band, Mapleoak, Endersby had used his contacts to help English engineer John Stewart land a job at Eastern Sound studios.

Stewart reciprocated by offering some studio time and the guitarist rounded up ex-Luke & The Apostles’ drummer Pat Little, who’d played on Van Morrison’s “Caravan”; former Paupers and McKenna Mendelson Mainline bass player Denny Gerrard and up and coming guitarist Gary Holmes. James and Roth dropped by and ended up joining.

Abetted by several side musicians – famed blues guitarist Mike McKenna, sax player Bert Hermiston and bass player Dennis Pendrith, Heaven and Earth signed a deal with RCA Victor and laid down about eight tracks, including the excellent “Together People”.
Propelled by Gerrard’s funky bass lines and Hermiston’s chugging sax, Rick James’s “Big Showdown” backed by the brilliant “Don’t You Worry” had hit single written all over it.

Likewise, the Rick James/Mike McKenna follow up, “You Make The Magic”, coupled with the funk instrumental “Rip Off 1500″, should have been another monster hit – it even secured a cover version via The Chambers Brothers.

But it wasn’t to be. With the tracks logged, Rick James left abruptly to start White Cane, taking Gerrard and Roth with him. Horn players Bob Doughty and Ian Kojima (who later played with Chris de Burgh); guitarist Nick Balkou; organist John Cleveland Hughes; and drummer Norman Wellbanks were all poached from local funk band Milestone.

Doughty remembers his first run-in with Rick James when he sat in with Milestone at On the Bar, a club in downtown Toronto.

“One night this extremely flashy black guy approached us and asked if he could sing a couple of numbers with us in our last set. We jammed on a couple of blues tunes, Stones tunes and were introduced to this non-stop moving, harmonica playing, wailing fool, the likes no one had seen before. The crowd ate it up!”

Financed by Rick James’s lawyer, Stan Weisman, White Cane cut some demos in October 1971. Then, within weeks, the band relocated to L.A. where a deal was struck with Lion Records, a subsidiary of MGM.

Matched with producer Jimmy Ienner, recording ensued at Village Recorders in Century City in February-March ‘72 with the band reworking Heaven and Earth tracks alongside new material.

In June, with the single “You Make the Magic” catching airplay, the band embarked on a North American tour opening for BB King but ran into problems on the first night in Vancouver.

“I think we did two songs and the crowd loved us. Then all of a sudden Rick wants to do a cappella version of ‘The Times They-Are-A-Changin’ and he wants to get the crowd to clap along with it,” remembers Ed Roth.

“So, he says, ‘Put your hands together. I said put your f*****g hands together’. We lost the crowd every time. We pleaded with him to stop doing that, but this went on show after show after show. It was probably the coke.”

Further into the promotional tour, the band hit the rocks. “We were scheduled to play Massey Hall in Toronto and on arriving we were hit with a $250,000 law suit for breach of contract with our former management team and Rick personally from RCA,” remembers Balkou.

“We quickly learned [while making our way down from New England] that MGM, though committed to the tour, would not release our LP and withdrew their support. The law suit was dropped but Rick decided to leave the tour since in his mind, there was nothing waiting for him in L.A.”

Stan Weisman, who invested heavily in the singer, was particularly frustrated by James’s action. “They had all the money behind them, the promotion was going on, the album was about to be released and I think they would have made the top because that was a hell of a band,” he says.

Back in Toronto that September, James talked his way into American expatriate Bill King’s group, which comprised guitarist Danny Marks; violinist Ian Guenther; conga player Bill Usher; bass player Chris Vickery; and English drummer Malcolm Tomlinson.

Marks remembers the line up making a rare appearance on City-TV, Canada’s largest independent television station, which he thinks was produced by David Acomba.

Then, on 3 January 1973, Rick James (possibly with King’s band) entered Toronto’s Manta Sound to record a four-track demo comprising “Grim Reaper”, “Your Old Man”, “Rock and Roll Baby” and a song he’d written about Bruce Palmer’s wife called “Sally Walker”.

Not long after, Rick James formed the original Stone City Band, which featured Danny Marks and Malcolm Tomlinson alongside the ever loyal Ed Roth and bass player Peter Hodgson, a former member of Elektra Records’ band, Rhinoceros.

Over a two-week period, commencing 23 May through to 2 June, The Stone City Band laid down a dozen tracks at Bruce Anthony’s home studio, Tatsi, combining re-recordings of three of the demo tracks with new songs like “Sweet Cocaine”, “Annie”, “Give A Little Bit” and “American Legion Crowd” but the material remained in the can.

When Marks bailed, James showed his displeasure. “I asked Malcolm [Tomlinson] to collect my 1960 Fender concert amp because I didn’t want to go up to the house,” remembers the guitarist.

“He brings it back and I look at it, and go ‘Wow, it’s fine’. Somehow, I thought Rick would carve his initials in it. And I plug it in and turn it on standby and it lights up and I am thinking, ‘Oh cool, it’s fine’. Then I turn the amp on and ‘poof’ a big pall of smoke comes up. I turn it around and look in the open back of the cabinet and each of the four vintage Jensen speakers has a hole poked like with a knife or a pen right through the paper core of the beautiful vintage speaker.”

Not long after, Rick James split and spent the next three years moving between the US, Canada and Europe, sitting in with various projects and recording intermittently.

“Rick had an uncanny knack of endearing himself to people,” says Kelly Shanahan (aka Misener), who was married to the singer from 1974-1978. “He was quite a charming guy and for all his faults, he was one of the most unique individuals I’ve ever met.”

Shanahan remembers the couple spending a lot of time apart, including a short Swedish tour that James undertook with pianist Billy Preston in the mid-1970s.

Around this time, he also returned to L.A to cut a one-off single with A&M Records, which resulted in a brilliant funk/soul single “My Mama” c/w “Funkin’ Around”.
Back in Toronto, Rick James hooked up with noted Canadian producer/engineer George Semkiw, famous for working with such notable artists as Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Lou Reed and Daniel Lanois.

Using local musicians Jerry Fuller (drums), Michel Donato (bass), Rick Morrison (sax) and possibly Brian Russell (guitar), Semkiw produced two tracks – “Hollywood Star Parts 1 and 2″ at a session in late 1975. Two more tracks – “Sweet Surrender” and “Changes” were cut soon after with James on drums and Semkiw providing bass and guitar.

A deal was secured with Toronto’s Quality Records (and while a few copies of “Hollywood Star Parts 1 and 2″ slipped out under Rick James & Hot Lips) James’s increasingly erratic behaviour nixed any promotion.

“Just before the release date [for the singles] Rick informed me and the record company that due to some legal problems, we could not use Rick’s name on the record. After some discussion it was decided to release them under the name Gorilla but not much happened.”

The pair put together a new version of The Stone City Band with South African guitarist Aidan Mason and bass player Peter Cardinali and recorded a one-off single for Nolasco’s Mood Records label – the Aidan Mason/Rick James collaboration, “Get Up and Dance”, which became a top 10 hit in western New York State after being picked up by Polydor.

“We recorded an album and brought The Brecker Brothers in from New York,” remembers Nolasco. “Jay Beckenstein from Spryo Gyra and Pete Cardinali did the horn arrangements. This was the product that Rick and I took to L.A. Motown was all over it and the rest is history.”

Resigned to Berry Gordy’s soul stable, Rick James’s finally tasted the commercial success that had eluded him for over a decade. For those who had helped him on his way, however, there are mixed emotions.

“He owed everybody money and he took from everybody. He used everybody,” says Danny Marks. “But there was a lot of joy. He was a larger than life sort of character, charismatic as hell and brilliantly creative in all these genres, all believable, all great song-writing.”

Stan Endersby agrees: “He was super-talented. I knew he was going to make it because he was so determined. Nothing was going to get in his way. But there was also a real loving person. He was a good friend.”

Nick Warburton is researching a book around The Mynah Birds and its members. This material is drawn from his original research and an on-going documentary project filmed with Stan Endersby